Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

Not me.

My view of existence is neither romantic nor sentimental. But on this night, adrift and mourning the loss of my friend, Tomlinson’s judgment seemed, at once, valid and terrible. Eons ago, the first one-celled animal developed a circulatory system in which its lifeblood was pure seawater. I was not that much different, nor, it seemed in this moment, were the best of the many good men and women I’ve known.

I’d put myself in Janet’s place, and I’d learned a little. But I also knew that I would never understand intellectually or emotionally what she’d felt that night. It was impossible, because the circumstances were so different and we were such dissimilar people. A few months back, to celebrate a birthday, I’d swum four miles of open water, St. Petersburg to Tampa. When I’d told Janet, she’d marveled: “My God, I’ve driven across the Sunshine Skyway, and that bay is huge! You actually swam across it?” Now I was still tethered to a floating boat that had a bed and blanket waiting for me. Aboard were people who would answer if I called for help. Aboard the boat were VHF and single sideband radios. I was in the water, but I was still safely, securely connected.

But my friend Janet had experienced the bottomless void. She’d been swept away by a mindless thing that we all dread. Which is possibly why human nature won’t allow an individual-or three-to vanish without explanation. Blame and reason are contrivances to which we cling for comfort, a way of imposing order. When one is dealing with deep ocean, however, all acts are expeditionary, and even the most mundane untethering-such as pointing a small boat offshore-carries risk.

How can you blame the sea? At night, alone, waves are as indifferent as wind, or the void that is the backdrop for a flashing light at sea.

I’d learned enough, and what I’d learned was not comforting. I could never share that knowledge. I would never share it. As Janet’s friend, I would do what she would have wanted me to do: Protect her friends from the truth.

I climbed back aboard, found a towel, and stripped naked, drying myself. Then I stood in the wind, hands on hips, feet set wide for balance, looking at the star streaks and comet swirls of two unfathomable spheres: sea and space. The constellations Orion and Cassiopeia were bright in the autumn sky; the Pleiades, a hazy, crooked A-shape. At home, from my stilted house, those star-shapes were familiar guideposts. Out here, sixty miles at sea, they seemed gaseous and foreign, insensible with their vacuum chill.

I continued to stare into space, drying myself, and then I stopped, as I was drying my hair, surprised to hear a polite clearing of the throat behind me. I turned, still scrubbing away, to see JoAnn standing in the companionway. There wasn’t enough light to decipher her expression, but there was a weary, weary smile in her voice, as she said, “Leave it to you to find a way to get my mind on something else. Out for a late-night swim, were we?”

I wrapped the towel around my waist as I told her, “I had to know. I had to find out for myself what it was like for Janet and the other two.” In the moment of my speaking, it seemed irreverent to leave Janet’s companions nameless, bodiless, so I added, “Michael Sanford and the other woman, Grace Walker. All three. So I got in the water.”

JoAnn stepped over to me and laced the fingers of her right hand into mine, palm up, and gave me a shake of mild reproach. “Don’t do that, Doc. Don’t try anything like that ever again, not at night, not unless you tell us! I couldn’t bear it if you disappeared out here, too. Christ, I always thought I loved the Gulf, but I’m coming to despise it. It scares the hell out of me like it never did before.”

JoAnn has a flexible, expressive voice, and it stumbled a little as she then asked a question that she wasn’t certain she wanted answered. “So how was it once you got away from the boat? In the water at night, I mean. God, I can’t imagine.”

I told her, “It’s colder than I thought. That surprised me, but it’s a good thing for us all to know, so I’m glad I used myself as a guinea pig. After getting in there, I’m convinced that in the first hours after their boat sank, they were probably still in pretty good spirits-you know, confident they were going to be rescued at dawn. Then sometime the next day, they just drifted off to sleep, one by one. It was so gradual, they probably didn’t even realize what was happening.”

I was wrong, so very, very wrong-but it was an unintentional lie, an attempted kindness.

I felt JoAnn squeeze my hand. “Thanks. No wonder you’ve never married. You’re such a terrible liar, no woman could depend on you to lie when she needed a little ego boost.”

Then, as she pulled herself closer, she added, “Rhonda sent me to ask you. We talked about it. After what happened to Janet, after being in this freaking wind for six days, all the polite little rules and laws; all the social-moral crap about how we’re supposed to behave, and what we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do, it… everything just seems like a bunch of bullshit. I mean, this makes all our silly little worries seemed stupid. We’re alive! And we’re alive for such a short time, why not have fun? Why not be with the people you care about and make them feel great?”

She was bouncing around, not tracking clearly. I said, “Well… sure, very short lives. Yeah, I guess.”

Her voice took on a small, rueful quality. “Does what I’m saying make any sense? Or am I just making an ass of myself because of what I’m asking?” She was stammering now. Standing there in her thin white T-shirt in the chill wind, brown hair tinted amber in the moonlight, oddly embarrassed.

I said, “No, I have no idea what you’re getting at. Rhonda sent you to ask me what?”

She tapped fingers to her forehead. “You mean I didn’t say it? Jeez, my brain really is scrambled. Turns out she gave Jeth two Valiums, and he’s out like a light, the poor babe. So Rhonda and I want you to come down… to, well, basically to hang out with us.”

I chuckled, pulled her to me, and kissed her on the top of the head. “Know what? Our little hugging session actually did make me feel better so, yeah, I’ll come down to say good night. Give me a minute to get some dry shorts on and a T-shirt.”

She touched her fingers to my shoulder, stopping me as I turned away. She stood there looking up at me in the moonlight-a friend I’d known so long and so intimately that I no longer saw the features of her face, only the warmth of her expression. “Don’t make this hard on me, Doc. What I’m telling you is, you don’t need your shorts or your shirt. Come just the way you are.”

I said, “JoAnn? Are you asking… wait a minute, do you mean-?”

She said, “Yeah, ol’ buddy. That’s exactly what we mean.”

I stood there, mouth agape, until she took my elbow and tugged.

“We’ve got wine,” she said.

Florida has the population of a fair-sized nation, and the disappearance of three people grabbed some quick headlines. But, very soon, it was business as usual on what Tomlinson once described as the “Disney Peninsula-a multitonomous fantasy that features every brilliance of the racial rainbow, along with every human fakery and illusion.”

The media wave peaked with interest momentarily but then flooded away just as fast, once again indifferent to the fact that three people had lived and died.

Physically and metaphorically, Janet and her companions had been swept out of sight, and the news gatherers went on to more current matters: On Thanksgiving Day in Miami’s Liberty City, members of a ghetto gang called the Spliffs stopped four Canadians in a rental car and shot them to death because the Canadians had made the outrageous mistake of taking the wrong exit off Interstate 95, and then onto the gang’s neighborhood street.